Welcome to ChipWhisperer - the complete open-source toolchain for side-channel power analysis and glitching attacks. This is the main landing page for ChipWhisperer as of January 2017, with the objective of transitioning most community material into this format. ChipWhisperer has been presented at conferences such as DEFCON and Blackhat, had a successful Kickstarter (that delivered ahead of schedule), and placed 2nd place in the first annual Hackaday Prize. ChipWhisperer has been used in a number of academic articles, and is featured in the Car Hacking Handbook. Portions of the design have even been used by Los Alamos Labs for an electron accelerator. You can see a full list of references on the Press page.

ChipWhisperer is maintained by NewAE Technology Inc., which sells a combination of open-source hardware, supporting tools, training, and consulting services. ChipWhisperer is trademark of NewAE Technology Inc., registered in the US and Europe. This means only NewAE can sell official products under the ChipWhisperer name, and was done to ensure products meet Quality Control Guidelines, as these fairly complex products require good testing to ensure you don't have a frustrating experience.

Contents

Getting Started

Where to begin? If you're new to this area, see the Getting Started page, which details how you can get involved in side-channel power analysis. From there you can see the hardware documentation (linked below), or take one of the Training Courses.

Sample Projects and Tutorials

ChipWhisperer Tutorials

The following tutorials use the ChipWhisperer software and/or hardware. They are designed to take you through a complete attack. You may also want to check the page on Embedded Attacks for more snippets of simple attacks and other things you should verify when making a secure system.

Not all tutorials are possible with all hardware. See the various tutorial pages for details.

Example Attacks / Other

While ChipWhisperer started as a side-channel power analysis platform, it has grown to be useful in other attack types. This section is designed to show you a wide variety of attacks on embedded systems, to give you an idea of what is required for building secure embedded systems. These are held on the page Embedded Attacks.

In 2016, ChipWhisperer was used as part of the CHES2016 CTF challenge. See details of the event on the CHES2016 CTF page.